Ghost in the Machine: Secret State Teams Up with Ad Pimps to Throttle Privacy

Tom Burghardt
Antifascist Calling

The secret world of "cyber situational awareness" is a spymaster's wet dream, made all the more alluring by the advent of ultra high speed computing and the near infinite storage capacity afforded by massive server farms and the ubiquitous "cloud."

Within that dusky haze, obscured by claims of national security or proprietary business information, take your pick, would you bet your life that the wizards of misdirection and deception care a whit that you really are more than a disembodied data point?

Lost in the debate surrounding privacy invasion and data mining however, is the key role that internet service providers (ISPs) play as intermediaries and gatekeepers. From their perch, ISPs peer deeply into and collect and analyze the online communications of tens of millions of users simultaneously, in real-time.

Concerted efforts to eliminate online anonymity, in managed democracies and authoritarian regimes alike, are greatly enhanced by the deployment of deep packet inspection (DPI) sensors and software on virtually all networks.

As Canadian privacy watchdogs DeepPacketInspection.ca tell us, DPI offer ISPs

"unparalleled levels of intelligence into subscribers' online activities."

"To unpack this a little" they aver, "all data traffic that courses across the 'net is contained in individual packets that have header (i.e. addressing) information and payload (i.e. content) information. We can think of this as the address on a postcard and the written and visual content of a postcard."

All of which is there for the taking, "criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial," Cryptohippie chillingly informs.


More on Obama's Capitulation and Betrayal

Stephen Lendman


Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY,
left, and House Minority Leader John Boehner of
Ohio, R - OH center

With help from Democrats controlling both Houses, Obama put a criminal cabal in charge of furthering the greatest wealth transfer in history. In the process, he's hollowing out America, eliminating the middle class, centralizing power, eroding social services, destroying jobs and communities, and creating poverty, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, a permanent underclass, and depravation under militarized homeland repression.

A man of the people promising change, in fact, is a shameless demagogue, a serial liar, a hardline corporatist serving big money wealth and power against ideals candidate Obama professed. He facilitated a Wall Street coup d'etat, lavished handouts on other corporate favorites, and now his latest December 6 betrayal, capitulating to Republicans on tax cuts for the rich and super-rich, throwing crumbs at working Americans to soothe public anger. A previous article explained, accessed through this link.

Despite a clear victory for wealth and power, Obama calls his decision "a good deal for the American people," defending it as a back-door stimulus plan saying:

Business must create jobs. "The single most important jobs program we can put in place is a growing economy. The single most important anti-poverty program we can put in place is making sure folks have jobs and the economy is growing....if the private sector is not hiring faster than (currently), then we are going to continue to have problems no matter how many programs we put in place."

False. As Roosevelt's New Deal agenda showed - 15 landmark laws [were] enacted to deal with a troubled economy, including government funded stimulus to revive it. Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) aid pumped billions into the economy in loans to banks, railroads, farm mortgage associations, other businesses and states.


WikiLeaks and the wicked disinformers

Paul J. Balles
Redress

Paul J. Balles debunks false arguments of “national security” expounded by the likes of Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post to bludgeon the whistleblower website WikiLeaks and argues that, rather than damaging legitimate US national interests, WikiLeaks is exposing matters of legitimate public interest.

That Afghanistan is corrupt is not news. Just how corrupt is news.

According to a report by Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, WikiLeaks exposes how,

"From hundreds of diplomatic cables, Afghanistan emerges as a looking-glass land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm and the honest man is a distinct outlier."

The New York Times report reveals how

...the collection of confidential diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to a number of publications, offers a fresh sense of its pervasive nature, its overwhelming scale and the dispiriting challenge it poses to American officials who have made shoring up support for the Afghan government a cornerstone of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Several commentators have complained of the embarrassment engendered by the WikiLeaks exposure. Washington Post commentator Charles Krauthammer claims that WikiLeaks have caused more problems than embarrassment.


Weak Links

Frank Scott
legalienate

The Wikileaks story has been treated by the establishment as a dangerous expose of imperial mind management and led to suppression, damage control and vindictive retribution. Meanwhile much of what passes for an anti establishment has expressed cynical disregard for what seems like old news, or treated the entire episode as another of the products of an all controlling deity-like complex of near invisible forces. These involve theories of manipulative plots and conspiracies to plot conspiratorial manipulations, all of them unknown to any but a chosen sect who seem to understand everything but how to stop the evil conspirators. The most extreme members of this cult are dangerously close to believing sunrise, sunset and the seasons are the result of machinations by a group of Talmudic billionaire Mossad agents sitting in a room in Tel Aviv or New York. In often mentally disabling ways these sources almost make the dangers of global capitalism and Zionist dominance of the American government pale in importance or even existence beside the threat of seemingly invisible forces that conspire to arrange just about everything. But many establishment figures, among them some of the foremost jackals and hyenas of the foreign policy establishment, have joined in cynically asking “who is manipulating us here?” All but totally submerged in consciousness is the risk that has been run by the Wikileaks group and its sources, nor is there enough awareness of the panic among keepers of the public mind and their lashing out in ways as irrational as some of the critics, though far more threatening.


WikiLeaks cables reveal secret ties between Rudd coup plotters and US embassy

Patrick O’Connor
WSWS

The latest batch of the several hundred leaked US diplomatic cables concerning Australia, provided by WikiLeaks to the Fairfax company’s Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age, provide further extraordinary evidence of Washington’s direct involvement in the anti-democratic coup against former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd last June.

Key coup plotters in the Labor Party and trade unions—including senators Mark Arbib and David Feeney, and Australian Workers Union chief Paul Howes—secretly provided the US embassy with regular updates on internal government discussions and divisions within the leadership. As early as June 2008, the American ambassador identified Julia Gillard as the “front-runner” to replace Rudd. In October 2009, i.e., eight months before Gillard was installed in unprecedented circumstances, Mark Arbib informed American officials of emerging leadership tensions. The Australian people, on the other hand, were kept entirely in the dark about any differences between the prime minister and his colleagues until after Rudd was ousted.

Gillard was described, some two years before the coup, by US diplomatic officials as the “rising star” within the Labor government. They made various enquiries into Gillard’s foreign policy sympathies, receiving assurances from government sources that her origins in the party’s “left” faction had no policy significance whatsoever. Arbib told the embassy that Gillard was “one of the most pragmatic politicians in the ALP”; Victorian senator David Feeney added that “there is no longer any intellectual integrity in the factions” and that “there is no major policy issue on which he, a Right factional leader, differs from Gillard”. When embassy officials checked on Gillard with Paul Howes, Australian Workers Union boss and subsequent anti-Rudd coup plotter, observing that “ALP politicians from the Left, no matter how capable, do not become party leader,” he responded immediately: “but she votes with the Right’.”

The Sydney Morning Herald and Age have published parts of the latest material in excerpted form, ahead of their full public release expected in coming weeks. They focus today on Mark Arbib’s role as a “secret US source”. One of the key apparatchiks in Labor’s powerful New South Wales right-wing faction, Arbib reportedly made several requests to US officials that his identity as a “protected” informant be guarded.


The woodshed *

Xymphora

The crime of Wikileaks was lèse-majesté, an insufficient deference to Power. The cables are instructive. The Americans could care less about the opinions of the leaders of various nonentities like Saudi Arabia or Great Britain. What is important is that American diplomats conduct a periodic check-up - like having your teeth cleaned - in order to ensure that everybody knows who the boss is. Thus, from time to time, world leaders are interviewed by American diplomats who say nothing and just write everything down. The various leaders struggle to say what they think the Americans would want them to say, and if they meet the test, they are allowed to stay in power. Just striving to meet the test teaches a lesson. Perhaps the biggest surprise from the cables is how hard everybody strives to meet the American test of fealty.

We're in the middle of a long social experiment to see what we will put up with. The plutocrats keep asking for more, and we just give it to them. There is absolutely no push-back whatsoever. In fact, all we do is ask for more punishment and deprivation. The results of this experiment have been so startling to the plutocrats that they have until recently not asked for everything, in fear that perhaps they would awaken a sleeping giant of rebellion. Nope. No giant. Just sleeping. The continuing non-reaction to the massive financial theft in Europe and the United States, where the thieves were not only not punished, but massively rewarded, was the final test. The only reason why we are not all slaves building pyramids to the glory of the plutocrats is that they, in their infinite generosity of spirit, haven't asked us yet. They will, and we'll start hauling rocks.


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